Posts by big_D

Re: Oppuortunity knocks

It is the legacy nodes (this has also been biting IT) that are hard to come by. Older plants, building older chips on older processes.

Even smartphones have been caught by this. Those older facilities build chips for everyone, including things like USB converters etc. in older, larger processes. There is no benefit for making them on smaller processes, it just makes them more expensive for no benefit.

Part of the problem with automotive was that they missed their windows and didn't order far enough in advance or have high enough priority (number of units ordered) and, because of close-downs, they cancelled some orders.

As the chip plants went offline due to COVID - limited raw material supplies, workers infected etc. - the production orders were cancelled or pushed into the future. During the re-jigging of production plans, small orders or less profitable orders were pushed further back, or fitted in, where there was free capacity. Plus, when the automotive production plants came back online, they suddenly wanted orders fulfilled at short notice, when the chip plants were already working over capacity.

The problem for car makers is that they order in relatively low quantities, compared to the IT industry, for example, or consumer and white goods.

IT and tech products (PCs, server, smartphones) need those legacy nodes as well, and they buy in the 10s of millions of units, and they probably source some of their high-value nodes from the same supplier as well, meaning they can apply more pressure to get their legacy nodes prioritised (hey, if you can't supply those legacy nodes, we won't need out high profit nodes from you either). consumer electronics and white goods are next in line and so on, with automotive being somewhere near the bottom of the pile and order on their JIT cycle, instead of stockpiling.

I work in a different industry, but we were struck with the same sort of raw material supply problems. Luckily, our purchasers saw the problem early and convinced management to bulk order on certain materials, so we had our yards full of raw material, but at least we could continue production. Likewise, strict controls on testing and quarantine meant we didn't have any COVID related production outages.

2.5 minutes for the repair, but there is also the travel time to the customer from the dealership.

That information is missing from the story. Whist $615 is excessive, even if the dealer was 2 hours away, the "lost" work time of the technician has to be accounted for. Those 4 hours travelling are hours he cannot work on other vehicles.

Probably still much too high, but it was more than just 2.5 minutes, unless the farmer was literally next-door to the dealership.

Without all the information - how much is the call out charge, how far was the customer away, hourly rate and minimum charge time (15, 30 or 60 minutes?), it is hard to see how that $615 was arrived at.

And, no, I'm not defending them, just pointing out there is not enough information to reach a conclusion, just enough to make a great story. I think Deere need to change their ways.

I deinstalled Google Maps from my last Android phone.

I rarely use navigation, so I didn't miss it - in the last 5 years, I've used Google Maps once and the built-in GPS in my car about half a dozen times.

Re: You can pry the ethernet cable out of my cold dead hands!

The other thing is, Ethernet goes between floors here at full speed (cables between the cellar, ground floor and first floor), Wi-Fi struggles to achieve 10% of its theoretical speed.

I have Unifi APs in the house and they were originally in a wireless mesh, but the floors here are all re-enforced concrete, which means the signals are a bit iffy at the best of times. The router is in the cellar and everything upstairs was getting, maybe, 1mbps from the repeater in the hall, but the signal quality 3M away, but upstairs, was around 1 - 2 bars. Throw in the waterbed and ordering new Kindle books at bed time was a challenge.

Putting a repeater upstairs helped, a bit, we had a solid signal all over the house, but throughput was still dire. Running gigabit Ethernet to each of the APs means full speed wireless on each floor.

Except, if the car has this sort of system, they will already have ABS.

Yes, I know, ABS doesn't reduce braking distance per se, it usually increases it, but the car is still controlable.

When I was regularly changing cars (pool and hire cars), one of the first things I used to do was to find a clear bit of road / a quiet road on an industrial estate etc. and practice heavy braking, until I got to know the car (and different surfaces) and could brake as hard as the car would allow, so the tyres were screaming, but hadn't actually locked.

I used to regularly test this on a backroad on the way home from work, which was usually dusty. One day, I was coming up to the end of the road and a woman in a Volvo pulled out in front of me, much too late for me to stop. I managed to "howl" the brakes, just hovering around the skid point, then, at the last second, come off the brakes, turn the wheel, dab the hand brake quickly, and back on the throttle and shoot up the side of her car into the junction she had just pulled out of. The look on her face was a picture.

It was just a reflex action, but, thanks to the regular tests of the optimum braking point, especially on this one road, I managed to pull it off perfectly. If I'd actually tried to do it, I'd probably have hit her 9 out of 10 times, but that one time, instead of panicking and locking up the brakes and ploughing into her, I somehow managed to actually pull off a near-perfect avoidance manoeuvrer - it was perfect, in that I didn't hit her or damage my own car avoiding her's, but a trained stuntman could probably have done it better still.

If the car is going to have an emergency braking system, I want it to be good enough and cut in early enough that it AVOIDS THE F***ING ACCIDENT IN THE FIRST PLACE!

My Nissan system usually shows the allowed speed limit for the stretch of road (E.g. 100km/h) and then a second sign next to it with the reduced limit, with a box underneath, meaning it is a reduced speed for special circumstances - it is still up to the driver to be aware of what those special circumstances and time restrictions are, as there are too many exception, such as Lärmschutz (volume protection for residents, reducing engine noise and tyre noise at night), roadworks, just for HGVs or trailers, only in heavy rain to avoid aquaplaning etc.

The cars I've driven use a camera to recognize speed signs and are generally accurate, but nowhere near accurate enough to use for speed limiters.

I believe my Nissan system uses a mixture of the maps in the nav system and the camera. It will show me the "mapped" limit mostly, but if I drive along a road with roadworks, it does automatically show me the new limit (most of the time) - the car is 100% offline, so it can't get roadwork information from an online database. Other cars I've driven with similar systems have been inaccurate as well, but usually in different locations, so each manufacturer's system has different strengths and weaknesses.

But, as I said, the systems aren't accurate enough to risk your license to - you still need to pay attention to the actual posted limits - let alone let the car decide how fast it is allowed to drive!

On my old Ford, I was driving on the Autobahn and the GPS started to go crazy and the map showed me doing 180km/h (~112mph) through the middle of a housing estate and it was constantly beeping and showing warnings that I should observe the posted speed limits (I was, the section of the autobahn I was on was unlimited).

Possibly a bit of an extreme description on my part, but if you are used to cars going where you steer them and have the normal light grip on the wheel, as opposed to "white knuckling" the wheel, it is a shock, when it suddenly cuts in and tries to drive you into a concrete wall or down a grass bank.

Re: Hire cars

The Octavia was my daughter's boyfriend's car. The Superb and Passat were a pool car at the office and my boss' car. The Kia and Nissan were demonstrators from local dealerships.

I've driven a few cars with lane-assist and it can be quite frightening at times (Kia Nero, Nissan Leaf, Skoda Superb/Octavia, VW Passat).

All of them have problems with the roads near me. The roads have been patched and repaired and all the Skodas and VWs will go up an off-ramp, then try and yank the steering wheel out of your hand to follow a tar repair-line to the grass bank leading back down to the dual-carriageway.

Likewise, all of them, mistake the tar lines at the end of the dual carriageway in the other direction and try and put the car into the central reservation.

The first time, I wondered what the hell was going on, I was in a Skoda, hadn't used cruise control etc. but the general lane-keeping feature was turned on by default. As I left the dual-carriageway, the car suddenly tried to lurch back left and I had to fight the wheel. Then, a couple of Ks further on, I went down a narrow, twisty country road and it did it again!

If I owned one of these cars, I think the assist features would be the first thing I'd turn off. Having experienced them from several manufacturers, they are certainly not something I'd pay extra for.

My Nissan has a lane divergence warning (it beeps if I cross the white line) and emergency braking assist. The lane divergence is about 80% accurate and the emergency braking assist leaves the warning way too late for my liking, let alone actually kicking in the brakes - I've never had enought confidence in it to not brake and see whether it will actually stop in time!

Overshoot at a speed high enough to cross the intersection and kill 2 people sitting in a protective cage?

Sorry, no. If he was paying attention, he would have noticed the vehicle hadn't slowed down when approaching the lights, let alone as he reached the lights. To still be going fast enough through the intersection to kill someone? He must have not looked at the road for a good 20 seconds (off ramp, approach to traffic lights, going through the traffic lights).

If the other party was already in the intersection he entered on red, then several seconds had passed between his direction being shown a red light and him actually entering the intersection. (Unless there was a traffic jam and the victims were sitting in the intersection, in which case he would have seen that even sooner and would have applied the brakes even sooner, if he was paying any attention at all.)

Re: WHAT !?!

The hand made ones from the original founding company, Konditorei Fürst, in Salzburg still sell them. Expensive though, as they are still made from the original recipe by hand.

Looking on DuckDuckGo, many places in Germany are still selling the mass-produced ones as well.

Re: US Army plans to destroy world economy.

And, with China ramping up investment in its own fabs, it would be in a key position to benefit from such a strategy, plus it would have all the talent that produced those chips, as they wouldn't be allowed to leave Taiwan after the invasion...

They'd have the rest of the world over the proverbial barrel.

I'd give the paper a very charitable E-.

Re: He'll learn

Excuse: Earth magnetic fields.

Now, just run back across the campus to your PC, holding the disk above your head, or it will erase.

(hint, the BOFH had already erased it.)

Re: Simon:

I first got them as a fanfold printout from our ops at around the same time.

I made myself a "complete set" in 2020, although it needs updating with last years episodes. It runs to well over 1,600 pages. I call it The Complete Bastard. I keep it with me for rainy days.

I even went through it again marking who they killed, maimed or got fired. The London "talent" pool has been truly decimated over the last 3 decades (well, it was down under for the first few episodes).

Re: He'll learn

Oh, the PFY has at least a dozen such learnings behind him. Given that the PFY must be at least 50 this year, I think he needs rebranding as the POF.

But he seems to age about as rapidly as Bart Simpson...

The same goes for the BOFH, he must be well on his way to 70 this year...

I made myself a collection of all the public BOFH episodes (there were a couple of special episodes for those that paid the Reg bribe money), I call the "book", The Complete Bastard... The first numbered year was 1996, but the BOFH goes back to the early 90s with the original Striped Irregular Bucket episodes.

I didn't get around to updating it last year, but as of 2020, the BOFH had killed 133 people, got 125 fired and a further 202 maimed. The PFY is only at 31, 28 and 101 respectively. I need to get busy updating my collection for last year.

Did that in our new house. I was putting in skirting boards and drilled a hole in the wall in the bedroom, only to short the wires coming up from the ground floor into the first floor, everything went dark!

Somehow, I managed to just brush the wires or the spinning drill caused enough interference to break the circuit. The drill was still fine and after resetting the breaker, I could carry on, putting the drill back in the hole was fine, but spinning it up caused it to trip again - so not a normal power surge.

Luckily an electrician friend of the family was there putting in some new plugs and light switches downstairs and he could quickly repair the cables in-situ, without having to break open the whole wall...

Re: Stuck in Outbox?

I'm getting around 2 days battery life out of my iPhone 13 Pro, about the same I got out of my Samsung Galaxy S20+.

Re: Apple and Bluetooth?

The Samsung Galaxy Buds+ from my old S20+ paired flawlessly with my iPhone 13. The only thing I would need the app for is to change the tap assignments or the bass level, but they are still as I set them on the S20+, so I haven't needed to install the Samsung app.

Re: Apple and Bluetooth?

I've not had any problems with Bluetooth so far... Samsung Galaxy Buds+ paired without any problem, my Polar fitness watch connected without problems, the car entertainment system, the kitchen radio, the soundbar in the lounge... All about as easily as they did on my Samsung Galaxy S20+...